SYRIANA

“Corruption charges...corruption?  Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulation.  That’s Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel Prize.  We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it.  Corruption is our protection.  Corruption keeps us safe and warm.  Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the street.  Corruption...is why we win.”

- Tim Blake Nelson as Danny Dalton to Jeffrey Wright as Bennett Holiday

From writer/director Stephen Gaghan, winner of the Best Screenplay Academy Award for Traffic, comes Syriana, a political thriller that unfolds against the intrigues and corruption of the global oil industry. From the players brokering back-room deals in Washington to the men toiling in the oil fields of the Persian Gulf, the film’s multiple storylines weave together to illuminate the human consequences of the fierce pursuit of wealth and power.

The intrigue takes place against the backdrop of an oil-producing Gulf country, where young, charismatic and reform-minded Prince Nasir (ALEXANDER SIDDIG) is seeking to change long-established relationships with U.S. business interests. Nasir, the apparent heir to the throne, has just granted natural gas drilling rights – long held by Connex, a Texas energy giant – to a higher Chinese bid. This is a huge blow to Connex and American business interests in the region. Killen, a smaller Texas oil company owned by Jimmy Pope (CHRIS COOPER), has just won the very competitive drilling rights to coveted fields in Kazakhstan. This makes Killen very attractive to Connex, who now needs new territory to maintain its production capacity. When the two companies merge, the pending deal attracts the scrutiny of the Justice Dept., and Sloan Whiting, a powerful white-shoe Washington law firm, is brought in to perform due diligence.

Bob Barnes (GEORGE CLOONEY) is a veteran CIA agent nearing the end of a long and respectable career, with a son headed for college (MAX MINGHELLA) and the possibility of spending the latter days of his service in a cushy desk job. A devoted company man, Bob’s always been a true believer that his work benefits his government and makes his country a safer place.

In Bob’s last assignment, an assassination of two arms dealers in Tehran, a Stinger missile falls into the hands of a mysterious blue-eyed Egyptian. On his return to Washington, Bob is promised a promotion after one last undercover mission – assassinating Prince Nasir. But when one of his field contacts turns on him and the assassination attempt goes terribly awry, Bob is scapegoated by the CIA, betrayed by the organization to which he has devoted his life. As he searches to understand what has happened, he begins to realize that he has been lied to – used as a pawn and never privy to the real motivation for the assignments he has blindly carried out for years.

Bennett Holiday (JEFFREY WRIGHT) is an ambitious Washington attorney at Sloan Whiting, in charge of the delicate task of guiding the Connex-Killen merger through the deep waters of D.C. He needs to give the Justice Department enough material to make their case against Killen for its shady dealings in Kazakhstan without jeopardizing the entire deal. It’s in the company and the country’s interest that the merger go through. It also serves Bennett’s ambitions – ambitions fueled by a father (WILLIAM C. MITCHELL) he is constantly at odds with.

Energy analyst Bryan Woodman (MATT DAMON) is a rising star at an Energy Trading Company, living with his wife Julie (AMANDA PEET) and their two young sons in Geneva. When he attends a party thrown by Prince Nasir’s family, a tragic accident results in the death of Bryan’s young son. Nasir attempts to make amends for what happened, offering Bryan a business opportunity to help the young leader realize his reformist ideas – an opportunity Bryan embraces, to the dismay of his grieving wife.

Dean Whiting (CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER), Bennett’s boss, the head of Sloan Whiting and one of the most powerful men in Washington, is trying to undo Nasir’s deal with the Chinese. He knows that Nasir’s younger, more callow brother, Prince Meshal (AKBAR KURTHA), will be more amenable to American business interests and he pressures the aging Emir to choose his younger son to succeed him, effectively engineering Nasir’s political demise.

At the other end of the wage scale in Nasir’s country are the migrant laborers toiling in its energy fields, whose lives are directly and drastically affected by the royal family’s policies and the vagaries of the industry. Connex workers Saleem Ahmed Kahn (SHAHID AHMED) and his son Wasim (MAZHAR MUNIR) have just been laid off from their jobs in the fields when the Chinese take them over, and their future becomes increasingly uncertain as they search in vain for work before their visas run out. Saleem dreams of someday returning to Pakistan; his son hopes for a better life but quickly becomes disillusioned and angry at the way he and his father are treated as immigrant workers in the Gulf. Wasim and his friend Farooq (SONNELL DADRAL) find solace at the local madrassa, a place where they are treated with dignity in an otherwise bleak and unfamiliar world. At the madrassa, Wasim and Farooq are taken under the wing of a charismatic and dangerous recruiter – the blue-eyed Egyptian with the missing Stinger missile.

Official Trailer at yahoo | Quicktime and Windows Media

• /http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/syriana/

CAST AND CHARACTERS

George Clooney / Bob Barnes : Veteran CIA operative working out of the Middle East
Max Minghella / Robby Barnes: Bob’s son
Jamey Sheridan / Terry George : Deputy CIA Chief
Tom M c Carthy / Fred Franks : Bob’s superior at the CIA
William Hurt / Stan Goff : Retired CIA agent, longtime associate of Bob Barnes
Viola Davis / Marilyn Richards : Deputy National Security Advisor
JANE ATKINSON / CIA Division Chief
Killen : Small Texas oil company that is being considered to merge with oil giant Connex
Connex : Powerful Texas oil company that wants to buy Killen in order to gain the smaller company’s drilling rights in Kazakhstan
CLI : Committee to Liberate Iran
Jeffrey Wright / Bennett Holiday : Lawyer investigating Connex/Killen merger
William Charles Mitchell / Bennett Holiday, Sr. : Bennett’s father
Nicky Henson / Sydney Hewitt : Connex’s Washington counsel
Christopher Plummer / Dean Whiting : Head of the Sloan Whiting law firm that Sydney Hewitt and Bennett Holiday work for. Member of the CLI
Chris Cooper / Jimmy Pope : Owns Killen Oil
Robert Foxworth / Tommy Thompson : Connex President
Tim Blake Nelson / Danny Dalton : Texas oilman working with Jimmy Pope. Member of the CLI
Peter Gerety / Lee Janus : Chairman of Connex Oil. Member of the CLI
David Clennon / Asst. Attorney General Donald Farish III: A former law professor of Bennett Holiday’s, Farish is investigating the Connex/Killen merger
Matt Damon / Bryan Woodman : Energy analyst at an energy trading company, living in Geneva with his wife and two young sons.
Amanda Peet / Julie Woodman : Bryan’s wife
Alexander Siddig / Prince NasirAl-Subaai: Reform-minded Gulf Prince, next in line to become Emir of his country
Akbar Kurtha / Prince Meshal Al-Subaai : Nasir’s younger brother, second in line to the throne
Nadim Sawalha / Emir HamadAl-Subaai: Nasir & Meshal’s father, soon to step down as Emir
Mazhar Munir / WasimAhmed Khan: Young migrant worker from Pakistan trying to find work with his father in the oil fields of Prince Nasir’s country. He and his father were recently laid off from their jobs in the Connex oil fields when the Prince granted drilling rights to a Chinese corporation
SHAHID AHMED / Saleem Ahmed Khan : Wasim’s father
Sonnell Dadral / Farooq : Wasim’s friend who first introduces him to the cleric at the madrassa

MOVIE POSTER ART

ABOUT THE FILM

ABOUT THE FILM

“We are living in complex, difficult times and I wanted Syriana to reflect this complexity in a visceral way, to embrace it narratively. There are no good guys and no bad guys and there are no easy answers. The characters do not have traditional character arcs; the stories don’t wrap up in neat little life lessons, the questions remain open. The hope was that by not wrapping everything up, the film will get under your skin in a different way and stay with you longer. This seemed like the most honest reflection of this post 9-11 world we all find ourselves in.”

- Stephen Gaghan

Syriana was written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, winner of the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for Traffic. Gaghan started thinking about the machinations of the global oil industry while doing research for that earlier film. He had met a host of powerful people in Washington, including those at the Pentagon who enforce America’s anti-narcotics policies. It was then that he began noticing some interesting parallels between the trafficking of drugs and the power plays of the oil industry.

“At that time,” says Gaghan, “the Pentagon’s anti-terrorism and anti-narcotics branches were the same branch. And I started thinking that maybe the biggest addiction in our country is how we’re hooked on cheap foreign oil. And that our easy access to oil is what gives us a good deal of our edge.”

When Traffic director Steven Soderbergh, actor/producer George Clooney and their production company, Section Eight, introduced Gaghan to See No Evil, a memoir written by former CIA agent Robert Baer, it was a perfect way for Gaghan to develop this interest. The book chronicles Baer’s experiences working out of the Middle East as a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations from 1976 to 1997. “Steve Gaghan once said to me that he thought oil was the world’s crack addiction,” says Soderbergh, “and I knew he would find a novel way of exploring that idea.”

While the book provided the initial impetus for Syriana, Baer’s experiences as a CIA field officer are what really served as a jumping-off point for the broader story that the filmmakers wanted to tell. “The book itself was fascinating,” says Clooney, “and the more time we spent with it, the more we discovered there was actually another story to be told beyond the one in the book. We saw the potential for Syriana to be made in the fashion of the films of the mid-60s and early 70s that were willing to discuss the failures of government as if they were failures of all of us, not just a particular party or group.”

“I think what we’ve done is preserve the essence of Bob, even though his storyline is fictional,” Gaghan says. “He also helped me understand the web of players in the Middle East and in the oil business that ultimately led to the choice to tell this story through multiple narratives.”

Gaghan researched the film for a year before beginning work on the screenplay, investigating the inner workings of the industry in the United States, as well as journeying to the UK, France, Italy, Switzerland, Lebanon, Syria, Dubai, and North Africa to speak with people at every level of the power chain that makes up the petroleum industry.

Bob Baer himself took Gaghan to explore the regions of the Middle East where he worked gathering intelligence for 21 years, introducing the director to a multitude of figures that exist on all sides of the industry, including oil traders, CIA operatives, arms dealers, and the leader of the Islamic movement Hezbollah. “I discovered really hospitable people with very articulate points of view,” says Gaghan of his travels. “I found that if you ask the same question to five different people, you get five different stories – and it’s still not the whole story. Starting from there, I tried to focus in on how this whole world of clandestine information worked.”

After his intensive travel and study, Gaghan began work on the screenplay, in which he would weave together multiple independent storylines that illuminate the inner workings of the industry and the figures who keep it running, whether through the wielding of their considerable influence, the force of their will or the exploitation of their labor.

The filmmakers’ chief intent was to tell a compelling story that also reflected the complexity and ambiguity of our current situation – one that that explores diverse points of view, while not championing any one perspective as the truth. “We’re not trying to preach to anyone with this film,” says Clooney. “Movies, at their best, can initiate discussions – obviously, in this case, discussions about world dependency on oil, but Syriana also opens discussions about corruption, about the effectiveness of the CIA, about any number of things. You want people to be standing around the water cooler the next day talking about it, saying here’s what I agree with or here’s where they’re wrong. We need that discussion.”

Gaghan also hopes Syriana will make issues and characters that seem alien and distant to American audiences much more accessible. “Any time the lens by which you’re viewing the whole can also be the lens by which you view the specific, you’re in better shape,” says Gaghan. “We’re able to go from Wasim, working with his father in the Persian Gulf, where he says, someday we’ll get a real house and get your mother here, to Robby Barnes visiting a college campus with his dad, Bob. The power of those specific images next to each other is that you hopefully start to feel connections that show you the whole: how we all inhabit the same world, and we all just want better lives for our children.

“This movie uses ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances to explore the idea that personal responsibility does matter, that our daily choices contributes to where we are on a global level,” continues Gaghan. “Bob Barnes is ultimately a company man who’s trying to do his job well and put his son through college. Bryan Woodman’s got a wife and two children, and then he faces the worst thing a father can go through when he loses his son. Bennett Holiday has a very difficult relationship with his father, so he’s trying to deal with these complicated issues in his work while also holding it together at home – which is a situation we all find ourselves in. So it’s through these characters’ everyday lives that we’re able to enter into a world that at first blush seems abstract to most people, but is incredibly relevant because this nexus of oil interests, terrorism, and the possibility of democracy in the Middle East powerfully affects our economy as well as our psyche and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

“While ‘Syriana’ is a very real term used by Washington think-tanks to describe a hypothetical reshaping of the Middle East, as our title it is used more abstractly. ‘Syriana,’ the concept – the fallacious dream that you can successfully remake nation-states in your own image – is a mirage. Syriana is a fitting title for a film that could exist at any time and be about any set of circumstances that deal with man’s unchecked ambition, hubris, and the fantasy of empire.”

LINKS

www.syrianamovie.com

www.participate.net/oilchange

Warner Bros. Pictures presents, in association with Participant Productions, a 4M film, a Section Eight production, GEORGE CLOONEY, MATT DAMON and JEFFREY WRIGHT in Syriana. The film also stars CHRIS COOPER, WILLIAM HURT, MAZHAR MUNIR, TIM BLAKE NELSON, AMANDA PEET, CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER and ALEXANDER SIDDIG .

Written and directed by STEPHEN GAGHAN, the film was suggested by the book See No Evil by ROBERT BAER, and is produced by JENNIFER FOX, MICHAEL NOZIK and GEORGIA KACANDES.  The executive producers are GEORGE CLOONEY, STEVEN SODERBERGH, BEN COSGROVE and JEFF SKOLL.  The director of photography is ROBERT ELSWIT, A.S.C. ; the production designer is DAN WEIL; and the editor is TIM SQUYRES. Music by ALEXANDRE DESPLAT.

Syriana will be distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company. This film has been rated “R” by the MPAA for “violence and language.”